Christopher Hitchens and Slate editors play dumb

Determined to be the last person to dissect in detail on the week-old (zzzz) story of Wanda Sykes' appearance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner nine days ago, Hitchens, in a very boring dispatch, explains why neither she, nor president Obama, were funny during the roast.

The rather astonishing part though, is that Hitchens has already famously commented on Sykes' Corespondents performance, yet both he and his Slate editors play dumb and act like it never happened. Both Hitchens and the Slate editors pretend Hitchens, just hours after the performance, didn't tell the New York Observer that "the black dyke [Sykes] got it wrong."

Does Hitchens have no memory of saying it? We don't know, simply becuase he never even acknowledges the slur in his column and Slate editors let him pretend it never happened, even though he's writing about Wanda Sykes.

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EricBoehlert
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A Senior Fellow for Media Matters, Boehlert is the author of Bloggers On the Bus: How The Internet Changes Politics and the Press, and Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. Previously, he wrote on staff for Salon and Rolling Stone.

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